Searching for Asherah

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Rev. Michelle LaGrave
May 12, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Did you know that God had a “wife”? Her name was Asherah and stories of this old Hebrew Goddess remain in the Bibles of today. On this Mother’s Day, let us reclaim the story of the Queen of Heaven.

Chalice Lighting

Blessed is the dark, in which our dreams stir and are revealed.
Blessed is the dark of earth, where seeds come to life.
Blessed are the depths of the ocean where no light shimmers:
the womb of all earthly life.
Blessed is the light into which we awake,
the light that sparkles on the waters: that calls the tree forth from the seed, and calls the shadow forth from the tree.
Blessed are we as we move through darkness and through light.

Call to Worship

THERE IS ROOM FOR YOU HERE
Mary Edes

If God is your strength and companion
and prayer the means of centering your thoughts,
There is room for you here.
If the teachings of the Buddha give you clarity and calm in the midst of human striving,
There is room for you here
If Gaia’s seasonal rhythms lead you best through the myriad steps of Life’s great dance.
There is room for you here.
If the still mysterious capacity and power of the Mind, stirs your imagination and quickens your pulse,
There is room for you here.
Rest now, beside that spring, wherever it is for you
And let your attention go to the small places inside or out in the great wide world –
places or people in need of healing or for which your heart is filled with thanksgiving,
And in that spirit, let us be silent together for a time.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

REMEMBER
(excerpt) by Joy Harjo

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

Centering

by the Rev. Victoria Safford

What if there were a universe, a cosmos, which began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single, silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant scientists, with their physics, their mathematics, their empirical, impressionistic musing, in trying to describe it, would begin to sound like poets?

What if there were a universe in which a world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it bloomed crocuses, and into it blew wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring, and into it at some point grew onions, out of soil, and in went Mt. Everest and also the coyote we’ve spotted in the woods about a mile from here, just after sunrise on these mornings when the moon is full? (The very scent of him makes his brother, our dog, insane with fear and joy and ancient inbred memory.) Into that world came animals and elements and plants, and imagination, the mind and the mind’s eye. If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?

We begin our candlelighting time with a communal ritual, honoring our most ancient of human ancestors and milestones …

Ardi 4.4 mya – Ardipithecus Ramidus (most complete early hominid skeleton, about 110 pounds, 3’11”, likely bipedal on ground, quadrupedal in trees, diet of fruit and nuts)

Lucy 3.2 million years ago – Australopithecus Afarensis

Over 2 million years ago – genus Homo emerges, the earliest hominins, use of stone tools begins (homo habilis)

Control of fire by humans, 1.5 million years ago (homo erectus)

Earliest evidence of homo sapiens outside of Africa, 210,000 years ago (Greece)

Mitochondrial Eve, 150,000 years ago

Earliest evidence for agriculture, now at 23,000 years ago (Sea of Galilee); certainly by 12,000 years ago

Biblical Eve: mythic story of leaving the Garden of Eden (out of Africa); transition to agriculture; transition to hidden menses and monogamy

Miriam 1200ish years ago

Our individual mothers: I am Michelle, the daughter of Nancy, who is the daughter of Eleanor, who is the daughter of Henrietta, who is the daughter of Eleanor, who is the daughter of Martha and I light this candle for all the mothers of my line.

I now invite you to light candles honoring your own lines of descent, or whatever it is you need to honor during this time.

Sermon

Once, early on a drizzly Saturday morning, I went to see the Dali Llama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. As I sat in this gigantic outdoor football stadium, he said: Think about this:

Everyone of us here, some ten thousand of us, has a mother. And he paused for a moment, allowing that knowledge to sink into our very beings. A hush fell over the stadium, so that in the silence, I could almost hear the thoughts of others, and I certainly felt the sense of amazement, as we took in this knowledge – that we are all connected to each other in such a fundamental way. It’s such a simple fact, isn’t it? We were all, each and everyone of us, born of a woman. And, I’d guess, it’s a fact most of us take for granted.

It wasn’t always so; this taking for granted of new life. Disconnection from our bodies and disconnection from nature is a rather modern phenomenon. Today, in this country, most of us were born in a hospital- in a sterile environment; with quick and easy access to life-saving drugs, equipment, and procedures; with quick and easy access to the miracle of medical technology.

For the millennia before the advent of modern medicine, we were born, that is our human ancestors were born – in the grasses of the savannah, within the confines of caves, under the protection of thatched roofs. Our survival, and the survival of our mothers, was always in question. For our survival, we relied on the wisdom of the women who had gone before, on the oral traditions that had been passed down from generation to generation, on the medicinal value of plants and herbs growing nearby. And – we relied on the Goddess.

We relied on the Goddess. Throughout ancient times and ancient cultures, it was the Goddess who was revered. Archaeological evidence from Palestine of the 13th and 14th centuries BCE in the form of clay figurines, with their emphasis on the elements of human fertility and survival, tells us that our earliest religious impulse, as humans, was to worship the Goddess. This makes sense to me – for as people we were intimately tied to the cycles and rhythms of nature, of the earth. We knew life and death, we knew the seasons of the year, we knew seedtime and harvest – in a way most of us, today, cannot and do not know. And we, that is our human ancestors, made the connection between human sexuality and reproduction and the implantation of seeds in Mother Earth, for our very survival depended on both.

Today, we celebrate Mother’s Day. Mothers all over the country will be blessed with brunch, courted with cards, favored with flowers, and showered with small gifts of time and treasure. Joy and good humor abound, such as was sent in this email chain, when 2nd graders were asked questions about the relationships between mothers and God. Here is a sampling of just a few of them: Why did God make mothers? She’s the only one who knows where the scotch tape is. How did God make mothers? Magic plus superpowers plus a lot of stirring. And finally, what ingredients are mothers made of? Clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.

Of course, Mother’s Day is not only joy, good humor, and celebration. On this day, children mourn the deaths of their mothers, mothers mourn the deaths of their children, and some children grieve the loss of the mothers they wish they had had or never knew.

When the Dali Llama spoke to that stadium full of people, reminding us of our common origin from our mothers, I do not know if he was aware of the approaching Mother’s Day holiday here in the United States or not. He taught of the importance of a mother’s touch, of a nurturing touch, in the first few months of human life; of its essential function in brain development. And he spoke of his own mother, telling stories from his childhood. He told us that his mother was a person of great kindness and compassion and he spoke of being spoiled by her. During the earliest time of his life, in the first two years, his mother carried him about on her shoulders just about everywhere she went. He said that when he wanted her to go this way, he tugged on this ear, and she went this way. And he said when he wanted her to go that way, he tugged on that ear, and she went that way. But sometimes, sometimes … she wouldn’t do as he wished, and he tugged on both of her ears like this.

Yes, this story is both funny and cute, and for that reason alone, it is one of my favorites. Without fail, I smile each time I remember him telling this story. To me, though, the wonder of this teaching is its humility; and the brilliance of this teaching is its universality. For all are not mothers, and many shall never be; but we are all children of mothers, we all were born of a woman, all- even Jesus, even Muhammed, even Buddha, even the Dali Llama. For this teaching gets at the heart of life, the cycles of life and death, or as the Dali Llama would say, birth and rebirth; for this is the universal connection of all human life.

Earlier, I spoke of the importance of the Goddess in early human religion; yet, our culture has developed in such a way that it is a male God who is most commonly worshiped. How did that happen? Where did the Goddess go? Did she simply disappear with the advent of monotheism? Almost, almost, but not quite … as we shall see, Biblical scholars and archaeologists have been busy rediscovering and reclaiming the Goddess of Ancient Israel.

In one of the most intriguing stories of the Hebrew Bible, God, who is very upset with the people of Israel, speaks to Jeremiah and says to him:

“As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger.” (Jeremiah 7: 16-18)

Later in the story, after the first Temple had been destroyed and many of the Israelites were exiled to Babylonia; Jeremiah then speaks to a crowd of refugees who had fled Jerusalem, explaining that they cannot escape the wrath of God by fleeing to Egypt.

“Then all the men who were aware that their wives had been making offerings to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered Jeremiah: ‘As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we are not going to listen to you. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine.’ And the women said, ‘Indeed we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her; do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands’ being involved?'” (Jeremiah 44: 15-19)

There are many, many interpretations of these passages of Jeremiah. Some say that the Queen of Heaven was Ishtar or Astarte, a foreign goddess; others say she was Asherah. Some say that she was the consort of the LORD of Israel; others say that she simply represented the feminine side of God. I believe the strongest evidence supports the idea that the Queen of Heaven was Asherah, the wife of the old Hebrew God EI, whose worship flourished throughout Biblical times. William Dever, a professor of archaeology, believes that the writers of the Hebrew Bible in their monotheistic interpretation were actually battling a widespread and well-entrenched folk religion; a religion practiced not just by the women, but by the men as well; a religion which revered and worshiped the Queen of Heaven in all of her local manifestations; a religion which worshiped a Hebrew goddess, yes, a Hebrew goddess, through and through.

Eventually, as we all know, monotheism and a patriarchal God did win the battle for the religion of the people, or at least most people. Worship of the Goddess continued, albeit underground and in secret, and survived through millennia of persecution; finally re-emerging in the light of day, or perhaps, by the light of the moon, in the form of pagan and wiccan traditions practiced today by UUs and many others, the world over. Other vestiges remain as well. The goddess has survived in mystical Judaism as the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God who dwells in this world; and the Goddess has survived in all of Judaism as the Sabbath bride. In Christianity, the Goddess has survived in the form of Mary, as the human mother of a divine God; a story long familiar to many pagan traditions.

Over the course of time, as human societies grew increasingly complex and more and more patriarchal; women lost much of their stories, much of their power, much of their access to the divine. Women lost their roles as prophets and priests. Women lost their Goddess.

As Unitarians and Universalists, we have our proud stories of reclaiming the place of women in ministry. Universalists lay claim to what was perhaps the first modern ordination of a woman to ministry; most likely, the Rev. Olympia Brown in the year 1863. Unitarians took their turn, a few years later, with the ordination of the Rev. Celia Burleigh.

Lest we be too proud of ourselves, it is also important to remember that the history of women in Unitarianism and Universalism was also sometimes problematic. Our triumphs were often more the exception than the rule. Despite our early ordination of women, many congregations rarely or never called a female minister. It wasn’t until 2017 that we elected a woman to the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association for the first time.

As we journey forward in our quest to regain the divine feminine, I am reminded of some old ideas about the unity of God. In Platonic, Hellenistic thought, society was organized in a hierarchy of those thought to be farthest away from God and those thought to be closest to and most like God (or the gods). Not surprisingly, slave women were on the bottom of the hierarchy. On the next rung up – slave men; on the next – free women; and on the next – free men. At the very top of the hierarchy, those thought to be most like God, were androgynous or gender-less people.

A similar line of thought continued in the writings of early Gnostic Christians found at Nag Hammadi. They believed that the end times would manifest as a return to the beginning times – to the time before humans were divided into male and female; when humans were simply one; one gender.

This yearning for unity, for the Goddess and the God, is reflected in these words by a UU minister, the Rev. Shirley Ann Ranck. She writes this as if from the perspective of Gomar, a devotee of Asherah, who is speaking to her husband Hosea, a prophet of YHWH, the LORD of Israel:

“Are our Gods so different? Must it be one or the other? Can we not dwell together in harmony? Is Asherah so different from the Gods of your ancestors, Hosea? … Were they so different? Elshaddai and Asherah? The Divinity of the Mountains and the God of the Air and Rain … Forgive me as I forgive you. Even as our Gods, the great YHWH and the great Asherah forgive us. May they live side by side. Although I know in my heart that may never be, I still pray for it …. And some day your world-transcending God will be reconciled with my world-renewing God, peace shall reign, and we shall be together again in the land.”

And so our search for Asherah continues. May we reclaim the Goddess while retaining the God. Amen and Blessed Be.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

Our circle is open but unbroken,
May the Goddess and the God go with you,
and all the protection they provide.
All are one.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.
Amen and Blessed Be.

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